(Image: Copyright American Heart Association)

Looking old on the outside might be a clue to what’s going on inside your body, according to new research from the American Heart Association.

The study finds that people who have three or four physical signs of aging —a receding hairline, baldness, a crease in the earlobe, or  yellow fatty deposits around the eyelid— also have a 57 percent increased risk for heart attack and a 39 percent increased risk for heart disease.

“The visible signs of aging reflect physiologic or biological age, not chronological age, and are independent of chronological age,” said Anne Tybjærg-Hansen, M.D., the study’s senior author and professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Tybjærg-Hansen and her colleagues studied nearly 11,000 test participants as part of the Copenhagen City Heart Study. They were 40 or older, and almost half were women.

In the study group, 7,537 of them had frontoparietal baldness, which is a receding hairline at the temples; 3,938 were bald at the top of their heads; 3,405 had an earlobe crease; and 678  had yellow fatty deposits around the eye.

Over a 35-year period, researchers followed the subjects and found that 3,401 of them developed heart disease and 1,708  experienced a heart attack.

Among the four signs of aging cited in the study include a crease in the earlobe (Photo: National Human Genome Research Institute)

Looking at the test subjects both individually and as a group,  researchers found that the identified signs of aging were  predictors of heart attack and heart disease, or both, without considering traditional risk factors, such as high-blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, physical inactivity or obesity.

In particular, the study found that fatty deposits around the eye were the strongest single predictor of both heart attack and heart disease.

Each additional sign of aging, among both men and women,  suggested an increased  risk of heart attack and heart disease. So if an individual initially had a receding hairline but later developed an ear crease, the risk of heart problems increased as well.

The study found that those in their seventies, and those who had those multiple aging signs, had the highest risk of coronary problems.

To gather data for the study, various healthcare workers, including nurses and laboratory technicians, examined the test subjects, recording the amount of gray hair they had; how wrinkled their faces were; the type and level of baldness; and whether or not they had an earlobe crease or eyelid deposits.

These findings, according to the researchers, suggest that doctors and other healthcare workers should look for these external signs of heart problems, while also considering traditional risks.

“Checking these visible aging signs should be a routine part of every doctor’s physical examination,” Tybjærg-Hansen said.

Indian researchers have developed a pain-free cholesterol test that uses digital cameras instead of needles. (Photo: Andrew Ferguson via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Checking your cholesterol could soon be as simple as snapping a picture of your hand.

Folks with an aversion to needles will welcome news that researchers in India have developed a cholesterol test which uses a digital camera instead of needles.

N.R. Shanker and his colleagues from the Sree Sastha Institute of Engineering and Technology write about their new, non-invasive  cholesterol test in a recent edition of the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics.

A snap shot of the back of a patient’s hand, taken with a digital or mobile phone camera, is cropped to focus on the finger creases  where  cholesterol tends to be concentrated and can be detected by the camera, according to researchers.

Using a special image processing computer program they developed, researchers compare the patient’s hand image to thousands of similar pictures  contained within a large database.

The database images represent varying degrees of cholesterol levels and each image is linked to a measurement that had been taken with a standard cholesterol blood test.

Indian researchers say the creases between fingers on the back of the hand can indicate a person’s cholesterol levels. (Photo: David DeHetre via Flickr/Creative Commons)

If the non-invasive test shows  a patient has a higher-than-normal total cholesterol level,  a more extensive cholesterol blood test is administered to determine the specific levels of good (HDL) vs. bad (LDL) cholesterol in the patient’s blood stream.

Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance  the body produces to help keep it healthy.  According to the National Institutes of Health, cholesterol makes hormones, vitamin D and substances that help digest food.

Our bodies produce two types of cholesterol, LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol and HDL (high-density lipoprotein).

Too much bad cholesterol can build up as plaque – a thick, hard deposit the artery walls.  Continued buildup of this plaque can develop into a condition called arteriosclerosis, or narrowing of the arteries, putting a person at risk of heart disease, stroke or heart attack.

Good cholesterol, according to the American Heart Association, is thought to protect against heart attack.

Some researchers even believe that HDL can remove excess cholesterol from arterial plaque, slowing down its buildup on the walls of your arteries.

High levels of LDL cholesterol can be caused eating a diet that’s high in saturated fats or it could be genetic in nature passed along within a family from generation to generation.

High LDL cholesterol levels lead to plaque build up on artery walls (Image: CDC)

Your bad cholesterol levels can also increase if you live a sedentary lifestyle.

Exercise can cause LDL levels to drop while levels of  good (HDL) cholesterol rise.

So if you find that you have an elevated level of LDL cholesterol, bringing it back down to normal may be as easy as eating a healthy diet and getting some exercise.